American College of Cardiology

ACC 49th Annual Scientific Session
Late-Breaking Clinical Trials
in Interventional Cardiology (#72)
Monday, March 13, 2000 (9:15 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

(ANAHEIM, CALIF.)—Although estrogen replacement therapy has been recommended for some postmenopausal women to reduce their risk of developing heart disease, whether it can stop the advance of existing heart disease after menopause is controversial.

“Recently the first major clinical trial testing the efficacy of estrogen therapy in women with established heart disease failed to demonstrate a benefit,” said Dr. David M. Herrington, of Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. “This has left a great deal of uncertainty as to whether estrogen is beneficial in such cases.”

Dr. Herrington will present results from the Estrogen Replacement and Atherosclerosis (ERA) study on Monday, March 13, at 9:30 a.m. at the American College of Cardiology 49th Annual Scientific Session in Anaheim, Calif. The ERA study will assess estrogen therapy for its effect on angiographic endpoints rather than clinical events. It is, according to Dr. Herrington, “the first randomized trial to look at whether estrogen replacement therapy improves not the risk of heart attacks but the underlying disease process of coronary atherosclerosis.”

The ERA study “should provide critically important information about how estrogen affects the arteries of the heart,” said Dr. Herrington. Combined with other estrogen trials examining clinical outcomes, the study could help show whether estrogen replacement therapy should be recommended to postmenopausal women with heart disease.

** Denotes news conference. See the news conference schedule for more information.